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Pat Summitt Celebrates Grand Achievement

Pat Summitt has been the face of Tennessee’s Lady Vols for 35 years, winning eight national championships along the way. On Thursday night in front of 16,058 adoring fans, she hit career win 1,000 with Tennessee’s 73-43 rout of Georgia. The Vols’ 17-5 record and No. 12 ranking are that much more impressive when you consider Summitt’s top two scorers are rookies.

Associated Press

Tennessee coach Pat Summitt has confetti dumped on her by some of the players who helped her win career victory No. 1,000.

“Few coaches on any level in any sport have this kind of longevity. If you’re going to work at one place for 35 years, you must be committed, successful and loyal,” David Climer writes in the Tennessean. “Pat’s batting 3-for-3. She’s as orange as they come.”

ESPN’s Mechelle Voepel says Summitt has achieved the 1,000th win thanks to a creative coaching move. After the Vols’ 80-70 loss earlier this week, a game in which Oklahoma’s Whitney Hand blitzed them for 20 points, Summit changed things up. “So to address that lapse by her players, Summitt had them do the scouting report for Georgia, not her assistants,” Voepel writes. “She decided that would get the point across about how important it was to really pay attention to the report.”

CBS Sports’ Bucky Dent concurs. “At 56 years old, Summitt remains as passionate as she was at 22. She made her freshman-laden squad wash their practice gear after a sloppy loss this month at Vanderbilt,” Dent writes. “She didn’t start [Angie] Bjorklund at No. 6 Auburn (on Jan. 25) because the sophomore left her shoes at the team hotel — for the day-before practice — and forced the team bus to U-turn back to retrieve them.”

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He’s sold a lot of jerseys in the U.S., but David Beckham may not play another match for the Los Angeles Galaxy. So much for the initial splash his 2007 arrival created for Major League Soccer.

Beckham, who’s on loan to AC Milan, isn’t interested in returning to L.A., and he said as much Thursday. He’d rather stay with Milan and play in a World Cup. Beckham, however, has a five-year deal with the Galaxy.

The Los Angeles Times’s Grahame L. Jones says that with the leverage it has, MLS should exact a princely sum for allowing the 33-year-old to bolt. So far, the Galaxy hasn’t shown signs of playing hardball. “They could have played the game the way the big clubs do — the way Real Madrid and Manchester United circled each other over the future of star player Cristiano Ronaldo last year, or the way AC Milan and Manchester City indulged in all sorts of give-and-take over the future of Kaka this year,” Jones writes. “Instead of going into hiding, the Galaxy and AEG could have and should have turned the tables. They could have started by saying that as long as AC Milan was courting their player, they would expect something in return — say a Ronaldinho or an Andrei Shevchenko, both of whom languish on the AC Milan bench.”

Sports Illustrated’s Jonah Freedman says it’s useless to force Beckham to stay. “Even if the Galaxy decide to play hardball, he won’t be a pleasant figure to have around L.A. this upcoming season,” Freedman writes. “After a torrid start last year, Beckham had a nasty habit of disappearing as it became obvious to him just how ‘inferior’ the talent around him was.”

Beckham’s numbers were pedestrian in L.A.: only five goals in 30 games. More than that, though, by bailing on MLS now, Beckham shows once again that players have all the clout, Martin Rogers writes on Yahoo Sports. “Soccer is a cutthroat business where players wield the ultimate power and are not afraid to use it.”

ESPN’s Steve Davis thinks it’s time for Americans playing in Europe to come home.

Meanwhile, the Independent’s Nick Harris says the Football Association, English soccer’s governing body, is worried about match-fixing.

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The Los Angeles Lakers have beaten the defending champion Boston Celtics twice this season, ending Boston streaks at 19 wins in December and 12 on Thursday night. In their latest loss, the Celtics believed Paul Pierce was fouled on the last shot. The officials didn’t see it the same way, and L.A. escaped with a 110-109 overtime victory. The Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan thinks the NBA had the wrong officiating crew for the rematch of last season’s NBA Finals.

“What were these three men doing working a game of this magnitude?” Ryan asks. “On a February Thursday night when there are only three games on the schedule, someone in power thinks that Monty McCutchen, Jim Capers Jr., and Leon Wood should be working what was, in the minds of many, the biggest game of the 2008-09 regular season? Really?”

The Orange County Register’s Kevin Ding sees promise in the Lakers’ hard-fought win. “The Lakers beat Boston at its own rugged game, leaving Celtics coach Doc Rivers lamenting that his guys ‘were the retaliators a lot tonight,’ ” Ding writes. “If the Lakers can win in Boston playing this way, they can win anywhere, anyhow.”

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Even though Citigroup has needed billions of dollars in federal bailout money, the beleaguered bank says it remains committed to its $400 million deal to plaster its name on the New York Mets’ new stadium. But New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly has a better idea than naming it Citi Field.

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Carol and Helen Galashan are 21-year-old identical twins training for synchronized diving for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. No surprise that they have the same interests: Both study sport and exercise science at Leeds Metropolitan University. In only 2 ½ years, the pair has become formidable, winning a competition on Thursday performing a world first: an arm-stand back double somersault with 1½ twists. “They share the same taste in clothes, music and food, have the same favorite color (pink) and last year, by sheer coincidence, bought each other the same Christmas card and the same present: La Senza underwear, same color, same style, same size,” Simon Hart writes in the Telegraph. “They also look so alike that people are forever getting them mixed up, and even their coach took several weeks to tell them apart.”

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We heard constantly leading up to the Super Bowl about the sportswriter’s No. 1 rule: No cheering in the press box. Even so, it must have been tough for Larry Fitzgerald Sr. to cover his all-world son, Larry Jr., whose Arizona Cardinals came up just short against the Pittsburgh Steelers in last Sunday’s Super Bowl. (And who, according to breaking reports this morning, just lost offensive coordinator Todd Haley, who will become the Kansas City Chiefs’ new head coach.) “It was an exciting experience to be in the spotlight with my son emotionally and share in making history when all I did was do what I always have done: cover his games and cover the Super Bowl,” Larry Sr. writes in the weekly Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. “No cheering in the press box — never have, never will — but this one will be with me for a long time.”

– Tip of the Fix cap to reader Danny Shameer and the print Journal’s Greg Corcoran.

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